


I can tell you the things that you know

by rosa_himmelblau



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [55]
Category: Wiseguy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:29:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29318661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: Tracy thinks she knows what she's doing.She's very, very wrong.
Series: The Roadhouse Blues [55]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1069713
Kudos: 1





	I can tell you the things that you know

The first thing Tracy did when her uncle called her to tell her what little he told her about why he wouldn't be coming back to the West Coast anytime soon—was break up with her boyfriend. 

Bill kept saying that she could tell him whatever it was she wasn't telling him. "Whatever it is, you can talk to me about it." It was the third time he said that that she'd told him to stop saying it, and when he'd tried to put his arm around her, she'd walked out. It was hard to have an argument when you couldn't say anything. 

She drove around for hours to avoid going home to her answering machine, the one with the multiple messages from Bill, whom she realized she wasn't ever going to see again. 

It sounded so melodramatic, too melodramatic to be true. She had known Bill since her first year of law school, they'd dated off and on ever since, he was—in some ways he had become the polestar of her other life, the one away from everything that happened on the East Coast, the one her family couldn't touch. When her mother came with her to this other world, they both left the old one behind, and her mother became—not exactly a part of her new life, but not the kind of burden her father—or, at least, her father's reputation—had been. 

When Uncle Sonny died, the old life disappeared entirely. 

And when Sonny showed up in her new life? 

Tracy never stopped to think about it. She'd put the conflict she knew was there in a dark corner in the back of her mind and refused to see it. Her uncle was her secret, one she didn't even tell her mother about. She found she liked this feeling that she had something that was hers alone, even if it was an uncle who told her nothing about what he did with his days, who invariably lapsed into treating her like a little girl, like someone who wasn't quite there. It didn't matter. He was her blood, and that was what mattered. She thought she could keep him in a separate place, away from the rest of her world, like a photo album hidden in a safety deposit box. 

That conversation with Bill made Tracy realize the flaw in her thinking. Yes, she could have her weekly dinners with her uncle, and she could not tell her mother or her boyfriend or anyone else about him, as long as her life stayed the same. She could even marry Bill—or somebody else, it didn't matter, she could marry some nice man and not invite her uncle, who wouldn't expect to be invited and wouldn't accept if he was. And that was as far as it could go, showing him wedding pictures filled with people he didn't know, people she'd never mentioned when she was with him because why would she? It was a separate life, and he knew that perfectly well. 

So, although she could continue the weekly dinners under the guise of working late—something she did nearly every evening she **didn't** have dinner with Sonny—the next real step would be a baby, and while her feelings for Bill were a little lukewarm, her feelings for this non-existent baby were as intense as anything she had ever felt. 

Tracy had wanted so badly to cut her ties from her family, from her blood, and when they had been cut for her, the sense of loss—nearly as potent as her guilt—had staggered her. For months after she felt as though she was slowly bleeding to death, all the energy escaping, unnoticed, from her body. 

She didn't know if she could cut them again, and she didn't know if she could sit across the dinner table from her uncle, carrying a baby inside her that he could never see grow up. 

For a little over a year, Tracy thought about that, mostly alone at night. She had to come up with some way to reconcile the two worlds in her life. 

Then her mother died. That left her with a family consisting of one uncle living in hiding, who called her once a week. 

A part of her thought about packing up and heading back to New York. Technically, she still had family there, even if was family she didn't know. Her mother's people lived in the Bronx. But she didn't know if they wanted her, and—and this was the thing that kept her up nights wondering if there was something wrong with her—they wouldn't be a secret. 

Maybe if she had been in love with Bill, having a secret wouldn't have been so important; maybe, if she ever met someone and fell really in love, she could detach herself from this secret life, maybe make contact with her not-secret family, or make his family hers, or simply make a family with him. 

Maybe. But it hadn't happened yet. 

"Stay away from Terranova!" 

"Daddy, I know you're trying to protect me, but—" 

"There is no but! You know better, you stay away from him—and he should know better, too. If he doesn't, that's another reason to stay away from him!" 

At least he was back to speaking English. Tracy hated trying to argue with him in Italian; she wasn't fluent enough, except for the swear words, and using those never won her an argument, it just started a new one. 

Of course, since he wasn't letting her get a word out, it didn't really matter what language they were speaking. 

"I'm your father, you do what I tell you!" Those had been practically the last words her father had said to her. He'd been so angry at her, at Uncle Sonny, even at her mother, though Tracy still wasn't sure what about. She had only heard her father's end of that argument, the one that had ended with, "I don't know what he's doing! I don't understand him!" 

That had been after the party. It answered one question, the one she would never have thought of asking if Rudy Aiuppo hadn't shown up. Her father had known nothing of the nature of his brother's attachment to Vinnie Terranova. 

Tracy had always considered herself open-minded. She'd had all the usual more-liberal-than-thou arguments with both her parents, but particularly with her father, who was old school to the bone. Fag was about the nicest word he used for homosexuals, and though they weren't the only minority he spoke that way about, his hostility was more vituperative; what she'd learned in her psych class was that men reacted that way because they felt threatened, so she pretty much ignored it, except for arguing gay rights with him every so often. Her mother's attitude was more fatalistic—if the queers wanted to ruin their lives, well, that was their business; she felt sorry for their mothers. 

And then there was her uncle, the one who was presently shacked up with a guy who used to work for the government. As Tracy recalled, his attitude on gay rights was bigoted, pragmatic, and kind of funny. "We only got ourselves to blame for this, Dave. If that whole thing at the Stonewall hadn't happened, the fags wouldn't've started thinking they could fight the system. We lost a helluva big chunk of business when the queer bars stopped needing protection from the cops." 

Short-term, he was probably right. And Tracy remembered, after one particularly loud battle with her father, storming out of the room and hearing her uncle say, "Hey, Dave, what do you care if she takes up for the fags? It could be worse, you know: it's not like she's gonna marry one." 

She'd been going over this in her mind, looking for some inkling that Sonny had been hiding his attraction to men, but what Tracy found was more personal. In any fight between her and her father, he always took her side, even if he didn't agree with her, even if it was just to say, "Quit yelling at her, she'll figure out how the world works in her own time," which was pretty much just saying she had a right to be wrong, or stupid, or naive. Maybe that was why she loved him so much, and was so loath to lose him. 

Anyway, none of that explained Vinnie, who had kissed her, and who her uncle knew— 

Well, not that they'd kissed, because nobody but the two of them knew about the kiss, probably. She hadn't told anyone, but who knew who Vinnie might have told. But not her uncle, not at the time, anyway. Probably not at all. But everyone had known that they'd walked together in the moonlight. 

Tracy would have sworn Vinnie had been genuinely attracted to her; after all, he wasn't the first man ever to kiss her. She could sense these things, usually. But maybe it had been part of his job, to cozy up to whoever he could, to find out whatever he could. _And what did he think he was going to find out from you?_ Tracy wondered, wishing she didn't care that she had just been part of his job. 

In the weeks and months after uncle fell—or jumped—down the rabbit hole, Tracy lived her life with careful predictability, assuming she was being watched. She made no changes at all, except for dumping her boyfriend, and if Rudy Aiuppo was interested in that—well, good. It would give him something to think about. 

She got the phone Sonny had told her to, and she waited for his calls. She asked him questions he didn't answer, and the only thing he ever told her was that he was OK. Vinnie was OK. He'd be gone for a while. _Gone where?_ got no answer, as did, _What's going on?_ She didn't ask him why Vinnie was with him—of course Vinnie was with him, he hadn't been able to stay away from Vinnie, had he? Sonny asked if Aiuppo had contacted her, but that never happened. In spite of whatever was going on, he kept his word. Sonny asked if anyone had contacted her, if she'd heard from the feds, but they never came calling either. He asked if anyone was watching her, but if they were, she never saw it. It was just her, by herself, with nothing happening. He ended his calls with, "Don't worry, Princess, everything's fine. Vinnie's real smart." 

The secret that was her uncle was heightened by this danger. Tracy carried the knowledge of his life, if not his whereabouts, inside her protectively, acting as though she carried nothing; it was like a secret pregnancy. Normal was her camouflage. For the first time in her life, Tracy understood her father and uncle's lives. 

It had never made sense to her, particularly her uncle who was clearly smart enough to run the Royal Diamond: why do business on the wrong side of the law when you didn't have to? The answer nobody ever gave, even if you were audacious enough to ask the question, was: it was fun. Something about it was fun. It made you feel smarter than everybody else, smarter and better. Special. This thing of ours. 

If she'd thought about it, Tracy might have seen just how crazy it was, the way she was living, but she wouldn't let herself. She was taking care of her family. What else could she do? 

When her uncle called and told her things were safe, he and Vinnie were settling down in San Francisco, the only thing Tracy thought about the location was that it had water and a big, famous bridge, and it suited him better than Malibu had. She offered to go apartment-hunting for him, and he accepted; she found the one he chose. She looked for one for herself, too, which somehow went without saying. She relocated without telling anyone but her secretary and clients she was going. There really wasn't anyone else to tell. 

The first time Tracy saw Vinnie was when they looked at the apartment. Sonny had set them up in the St. Regis Hotel until the apartment was ready, and not for the first time Tracy wondered just how much money her uncle had, and where it came from. 

She wasn't sure she would have recognized Vinnie if she hadn't known who he was. It wasn't so much his weight, which had gone up, or his personal grooming and attire, which had gone down. It was some spark that seemed to be gone. He followed Sonny, looked at what he was directed to look at, made the occasional remark, but— 

Tracy got the feeling that if Sonny hadn't prodded him to, Vinnie wouldn't have moved at all, that he'd have plopped down in a corner and just stayed there. And her uncle, who at times seemed to define manic energy, who was always thinking and going and doing, looked at Vinnie as though he simply adored him. It made as much sense as a rabbit falling in love with a potato. 

But after that she had no opportunity to observe them together—or Vinnie at all. Sonny took her out for dinner, or came to her apartment, but he never invited her over, and he never talked about Vinnie. Was his life with Vinnie Sonny's secret? Tracy thought so, with what she's surmised about her uncle's feelings for Vinnie. 

So, she hadn't pressed, had asked him only the vaguest questions to which he had given only the vaguest answers, and everything was fine, maybe. 

And then Sonny invited her over for dinner. 

_"Yeah, you don't get to keep these!"_ It kept replaying in her head, Vinnie ripping the papers away from her, shredding them, throwing the pieces at her. She was holding her open briefcase in front of her, its contents spilling as she used it as a shield, but Vinnie jerked it out of her hands and slammed it shut. Then he grabbed her by her upper arm and dragged her tripping out of Sonny’s office, through the apartment to the front door. He tossed her briefcase out, then pushed her out after it. 

Tracy kicked off her shoes, pushed them under the coffee table so she wouldn't trip over them later, then pulled off her jacket and dropped it on the sofa. She kept walking to her bedroom where she took off the rest of her clothes, leaving them in various piles on the bed and floor on her way to the shower. She really needed a shower. 

_"You don't trust me?"_

_"You don't trust me?"_

_"You don't trust me?"_

How many times had he yelled that at her? He’d been playing tough guy—Tracy should have realized that, realized it was pretense, but she was—she was so easily charmed by him, she was afraid to let her guard down or she’d never find out what she needed to know. He’d been playing tough guy with his chair balanced back on two legs, unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth, grammar iffy and Brooklyn strong in his voice. 

_"You don’t gotta trust me! Sonny trusts me and Sonny doesn't care!"_

He had stood over her, loomed over her, yelling—screaming, like an animal in pain. He’d knocked over his chair getting up, Tracy had wanted to leave, wanted to get out of there. She had no idea why he was suddenly so unhinged, and she was afraid—not of Vinnie, but of whatever avalanche she'd started. 

The shower didn't help; the water was too hot, too cold, too wet, too there, not comforting in any way at all. Her cocoanut shampoo’s fragrance was cloying and nauseating, and she hurled the bottle at the wastebasket. 

The pint of raspberry sherbet didn’t help either. She ate it as soon as she got out of the shower, standing in her kitchen, wrapped in a towel, dripping on the floor. 

Tracy paced around the living room, holding her towel around her, thinking she should get dressed, but— 

He hadn't exactly flirted with her, he’d really just been friendly, happy to see her, but Tracy felt like—she was uncomfortable, and what was worse, she felt like she liked it. Under other circumstances she might have flirted with him, but there was Sonny, and the whole idea was—well, inappropriate, to say the least—and anyway, she didn't trust him. She couldn’t trust him. 

_"You don't trust me?"_ Yelled at her with derision, with incredulity. Who was she to have an opinion? 

She wanted to cry, but she didn't seem to be able to. She wanted to scream, but she wouldn't let herself. She was so pent-up she wished she was the kind of person who threw things, like her father. Like her uncle. 

Pacing was a poor substitute for screaming or throwing things, but it was all Tracy could come up with to do. She tried Sonny’s number, but the line was busy. 

Vinnie had seemed surprised to see her at the door, but pleasantly so. His surprise was understandable—she was hours early for dinner. Tracy had suppressed her own natural response at being greeted with pleasure. 

That was the moment when she should have turned back, when she should have smiled back and said she just wanted to talk, put her briefcase in a corner, taken off her jacket, and sat on the sofa with Vinnie, getting to know him again. Why hadn't she done that? 

Because she’d been on a mission. It wasn't that she didn't like Vinnie—none of this had anything to do with liking or disliking Vinnie— 

No, that wasn't true. Maybe if she had disliked Vinnie, Tracy would have handled things differently. The problem was, she did like him, and more importantly, Sonny— It wasn't about how her uncle felt about Vinnie, it was about how he acted. Vinnie made Sonny stupid, which was really only half of the problem. The other half was, Tracy didn't know if she could trust Vinnie. 

_"Do you know what Uncle Sonny would tell me when he called? 'Don't worry about it, Princess. Everything's under control. Vinnie's real smart.'"_

Vinnie’s amusement at this had infuriated her, and why? 

Because he’d taken her secret, the thing that made her feel special, and what had he said? _"Your uncle is a lunatic. I'd'a thought your little conversation the other night would've clued you in on that, if you'd somehow managed to miss it for the last—how old are you now?"_ As though Sonny so wasn’t hers anymore, she didn’t even know the basics about him. 

OK, so she'd been stupid to assume it meant something, Uncle Sonny inviting her over for dinner, but if it didn't mean anything, why the sudden change? Was it maybe that Vinnie was lonely? Because Tracy had the unpleasant feeling that if Vinnie said the sun was in his eyes, Sonny would shift the solar system for him, if he could afford to. 

It should have been all right. She liked Vinnie—at least, she **had** liked Vinnie, back when. She loved her uncle and wanted him to be happy, and if Vinnie made him happy— 

Vinnie making Sonny happy—whatever that entailed, Tracy really didn't want the details— 

_”I sucked his dick for the first time a few years ago—pretty late in the game, when you think about it.”_ He’d said it to shock her, of course, but not really to assert possession. He didn’t need to, it was in every move and gesture. 

And that—it hurt, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was Vinnie making Sonny stupid, which he did. Tracy had seen it happen with her own eyes. 

Maybe she should have kept quiet when she saw Vinnie and her uncle— 

Tracy's brain didn't want to go there. There were things in life you weren't supposed to see, and one of them was your very straight, very—very— Tracy didn't know what word she was looking for, but it was the opposite of Sonny kissing Vinnie and stroking his face, and maybe even more, it was the antithesis of the hungry, adoring way he looked at Vinnie. 

Anyway, she hadn't kept quiet, partially because it seemed silly for them all to be pretending when they all knew the truth, and partially because she felt— 

He was **her** uncle, **her** family. She had some right to him, too. She had a place in his life. 

She called his number again, but it was still busy. 

Vinnie, with his eyes closed and his chair tipped back, reminded Tracy of those guys in high school who'd only been killing time—not causing trouble, really, but not paying attention, either. Just sitting in the back of the class with his friends, talking and laughing. 

But that wasn’t who he was. He’d had a scholarship to Fordham. He’d been in the Organized Crime Bureau, which was a pretty elite section of the FBI. He wasn’t dumb, he wasn’t just muscle— 

He was really smart. That’s what Sonny kept saying, but why did he keep saying it? 

What was strange and upsetting was that while Vinnie seemed perfectly fine with her knowing the truth, her uncle flat-out lied to her face. The part that made no sense was that while she was frustrated with Sonny, she was angry at Vinnie—for being on her side. 

The nightgown she'd put on felt too tight. She went back to the bedroom, yanked it off, and found the dark blue caftan Bill had given her for her birthday one year. It couldn't possibly be too tight. She put it on, went back to the living room, and dialed the phone. The line was busy. 

She knew she should have placated Sonny when he started yelling, the way her father always did, but she'd lost her fear of his temper and—it was so stupid—Vinnie was already half-placating him, kidding him, trying to get him to lighten up, and it just made Tracy so angry, she couldn't play that game. She couldn’t be on Vinnie’s side. 

So, she kept pushing, and Sonny kept denying, and all in all, it had been very unpleasant. 

The line was still busy. 

_"Sonny'd get some light time for—God, I don't even remember what anymore, he'd hate me for the rest of his life, and I'd go on to another case. Only it didn't work out that way."_

His voice had been ragged, bordering on tears, and Tracy almost said something, put an end to her questioning. But this was her only chance to find out what had happened, to really understand, and she couldn't let it go. 

_"I didn't know it, but Sonny had Aldo working the same game. I still don't see how that worked—Patrice must'a been blinded by his own arrogance, I guess, because anybody who **wasn't** blind would have seen how crazy in love Theresa was with Sonny, even that dumb shit, Aldo. He could've been stupid enough to think he could have betrayed Sonny and gotten away with it. Forget what his father would have done to him, Theresa would've hung him up by the balls."_

Tracy had nearly smiled. That all sounded so right, so familiar. She had known Theresa was in love with her uncle since before she could remember. 

As they argued, she and Sonny, Vinnie had gone to bed, and Sonny had pointedly said that he, too, was tired, and the next thing Tracy knew, she was standing in the hallway, her purse in her hand. Sonny did a very smooth bum's rush. 

The caftan wasn't too tight, but it was a little too long, and the sleeves were everywhere, in her way, and it was bothering her. Tracy went back to the bedroom, left the caftan in a heap on top of the nightgown, and put on a T-shirt and a pair of panties. Then she went back to the living room. 

The line was still busy. 

_"That night l caught you sneaking around in my father's office, what were you hoping to find?" she'd asked him._

_"Proof of your father's criminal activities, of course. What else would I have been looking for, a winning lottery ticket?"_

Tracy checked the time. It was just after five in the afternoon. Sonny wouldn't even be home yet. _And do you really want to talk to Vinnie?_

 _Of course not._

She went back to the kitchen, made herself a cup of chamomile tea that didn't help any more than the sherbet. She was cold in just her skivvies, so she turned the air conditioning down—or was it up? That was something that had always bothered Tracy. If you turned the heat up, the temperature went up and it got hotter, and if you turned it down, the temperature went down and it got colder. If you turned the air conditioner up, the temperature went down, so were you really—? 

She broke the cup she'd been washing. It just slipped out of her hands in the soapy water and shattered in the sink. 

It was five-forty-five. Sonny still wouldn't be home yet. Tracy cleaned up the glass, nicking her left index finger. She rinsed her hands under the cold water, then stuck her finger in her mouth. Maybe what she needed was something to eat, something that wasn't all sugar like the sherbet. She found leftover spaghetti in the refrigerator and scooped it out of its Tupperware container and into a saucepan to heat, found the sauce and did the same with it. Her mother's recipe, which her father always called Irish spaghetti as though it was as cute but foolishly flawed an idea as Tracy wanting to be a cowgirl when she was six. An epicure might have agreed, but mother's food was comfort food even when it was Campbell's soup and Oreos. 

_"Oh, yeah, I'm on trial here. But you got yourself a moot court."_

She stood in the kitchen deliberately not looking at the clock or sneaking glances at her watch. She just looked at her food and thought about how time was passing faster without her watching it go. 

But she started wondering just what she was going to say to her uncle once she got hold of him. Certainly not "Vinnie was mean to me," or rude, or even scary. Was there anything Tracy could say to Sonny that could make any difference? 

Vinnie had asked that, what difference did it make? 

And then what seemed like an unconnected thought: when her mother died, Tracy had changed all her emergency contact information to her secretary because if something happened to her it would be important for her clients to be made aware of it. There had been nobody else to put. Even under his assumed name, it would be dangerous to connect her uncle to the name Steelgrave. 

And what did that have to do with anything? 

_"Your father shot my training officer."  
_

The spaghetti and sauce were heated up. Tracy put them on a plate, which she carried to the sofa. She'd been planning on a glass of wine with her dinner but decided scotch would be better. 

_"Your father shot my training officer."  
_

How many times had he said that? 

_Vinnie shrugged, that_ who gives a fuck? _shrug she also remembered from the guys in her math class, the one that managed to say_ I don't know and I don't care _with no words at all. "He woke me up in the middle of the night—"_

_"My uncle?" Tracy asked, wanting to be sure she was following._

_"That's who we're talking about. He told me to put on my shoes and come with him, and I did. He'd bought back my car from the guy Rudy'd sold it to, and we drove away in it. And we kept on driving." Vinnie rubbed his eyes. "You want to sit on the balcony? It's nice out there."_

_Tracy shook her head, wondering if he was going to ask her if she wanted to go for a walk next. "It's a little chilly for me." She knew he wanted a cigarette, but that was too bad._

After their big shouting match, Tracy hadn't heard anything from her uncle. Sonny's silences could be loud, and full of portents and imprecations, and if ever one had been, this one certainly was. Tracy remembered when those silences were aimed at her father, the way he'd pace around the house, looking as though the whole world had been set askew. Tracy had always wondered just what he was worried about; to her, then, it seemed her uncle was as obvious a certainty as gravity. Now, though, Tracy felt as though she was clinging to a rock that an intractable tide was pulling her away from. If she didn't establish a better hold on Sonny, she'd lose him totally and forever. Which was crazy. He was her uncle! He wasn't going to stop being her uncle just because Vinnie— 

Just because Vinnie what? Had become his boyfriend? 

Boyfriend. What a completely ridiculous word. But it wasn't Tracy's choice, it was Vinnie's, sort of. She'd heard him, muttering to himself as he left her and Sonny to argue, heard him say, "If I wanted a boyfriend, you'd think I could get better one than **this.** " And she'd almost laughed, because it **was** funny, but at the same time it irritated her, though she wasn't sure why. 

_"C'm'on, Tracy. You don't care why I was abducted, and I’m not gonna talk about it just to satisfy your curiosity. You want to know about me and Sonny playing—Billy and Captain America for three years, and that I'll tell you about. Nobody died at the end, anyway."_

The day after that dinner, she'd cancelled all her appointments and spent her time finding out everything she could about Vinnie Terranova, everything the public record had to tell. There wasn't much—at least, there wasn't much that meant anything. His school record was mostly above average. His personal life had not made the public record beyond the death of his father and then the arrests he'd racked up to get himself a prison record so he could begin work as an undercover agent. And later he’d dated a record company executive, Amber Twine. That got him in the entertainment section. He'd been arrested several times since then, but it was hard to tell if it was part of his job or not. Tracy left out anything she wasn't sure about. Not for nothing was she a lawyer—she knew full well you never asked a question you didn't know the answer to, not in court anyway. There would be a few things she had to ask that she didn't know already, but that was why she had to ask: Vinnie had information she didn't. 

So, Tracy made a list of things she wanted to know about, things it seemed to her Sonny had been deliberately vague about: her father's death, her cousin Lorenzo's death—Sonny's attempted suicide. Why had Vinnie asked her to go for that walk, and why had he kissed her? 

Why did she need to know that? 

Because the real question was, who was he, really? And did Sonny know the answer to that question? 

_"Your father shot my training officer."_

That wasn't at all what she had been expecting. Not that, intellectually, she didn't know her father had—her father had killed people. But criminals, not federal agents. You didn't kill police officers, and you didn't kill federal agents; it was too dangerous. Everybody knew that, especially her father. 

_"Your father shot my training officer."_

Tracy turned on the TV, but she couldn’t find anything that interested her, so she put in a tape. But five minutes into it, her mind began to wander. Her mind kept trying to go back to Vinnie, but she wouldn't let it; thinking about Vinnie wouldn't do any good. She kept trying to force her mind back to the movie, but it wouldn't stay. Eventually they reached a compromise: she wouldn't watch the movie or think about Vinnie, which led to something that happened earlier in the day. 

They'd changed the lock on her office building, and when the maintenance man gave her the new key, Tracy had stuck in her jacket pocket. She'd left her jacket on back of the sofa, but it wasn't there now. Tracy got up, found her jacket lying on the floor. She fumbled through her pockets, but the key wasn't there. "It must have fallen out when I threw my jacket . . . ." Tracy looked around on the floor, finally lying flat on the floor to peer under the sofa. Nothing. She checked her jacket again; the key still wasn't in either of the pockets. She hadn't carried her purse that morning, she hadn't wanted to be bothered with it . . . could she have put the key in her briefcase? Tracy got it from where she'd dropped it, opened it and dumped the contents onto her bed. Some notebooks, a couple of Bics, two torn pieces of the faxes she's taken with her to talk to Vinnie about. One of the hinges looked bent. There was no key. "Maybe it fell out on the sofa . . . ?" Tracy shook out the blanket she'd been lying under, then pulled off the cushions and dropped them on the floor. No key. She ran her hand down the back of the sofa, where she found a bottle cap, three nickels and a penny, three Reese's mini peanut butter cups—which she peeled and popped immediately into her mough—and another Bic pen. But no key. "Could it have fallen out at Uncle Sonny's?" 

Why that idea should bother her so much, Tracy didn't understand. It was just—it was just that—she wanted—she needed to talk to her uncle, she needed to straighten out the mess she'd made with Vinnie, she needed—she needed to have an important conversation with him, and having to ask if he'd found her key seemed self-centered in a remarkably trivial way. 

Suddenly she wondered where her other keys were. Had she left them at Sonny's, too? But she couldn't have, she had to still have them, she'd driven home, she'd let herself into her apartment— Her key ring was on the floor by the front door; she'd dropped it when she came in. Tracy picked it up to hang up and saw that the new key was on the chain. "When did I do this?" She couldn't remember. Tracy walked back to the sofa, still looking at the keys, and sat down. She sat there holding the keys until the movie she wasn't watching was over. Static filled the screen, but eventually it would run out and the tape would rewind itself. Tracy put her keys on the coffee table and picked up the phone, but the line was still busy. She slammed it down and got up, determined to do something productive. 

Her bank statement had come a couple of days ago. Tracy found it in the pile of bills to be paid and took it to the desk. She started going through, adding in the amounts of checks that hadn't yet cleared, trying to come up with the same total the bank had, but she kept putting the numbers in wrong, hitting buttons on her calculator too many times, or transposing digits. Finally, she gave up. She shoved the register and bank statement, pen and calculator, into the bottom drawer of her desk and slammed it, as though they had done something wrong and were now being punished for it. 

_"C'm'on, Tracy. You don't care why I was abducted, and I’m not gonna talk about it just to satisfy your curiosity. You want to know about me and Sonny playing—Billy and Captain America for three years, and that I'll tell you about."_

Vinnie had betrayed Sonny before, used his feelings for him against him, and he'd been able to do that because there hadn't been anyone around to stop him. Well, now Tracy was around, and she wasn't going to let her uncle be used again. 

Tracy dialed the phone, got another busy signal. It was starting to get dark out. Sonny should be home soon, and then— Who knew, and then what? 

_"C'm'on, Tracy. You don't care why I was abducted, and I’m not gonna talk about it just to satisfy your curiosity.”_

She had done her research, she had her list of questions, some of them things her uncle would never tell her, some things she needed to know about Vinnie, some of them not very nice, but none of them damning. She had thought she was prepared—she was a lawyer, for God's sake, she knew you never asked a question you didn't already know the answer to, and she thought she'd known. 

It hadn't taken Vinnie long to figure out what was going on, and he hadn't liked it, but he also hadn't refused to talk to her, to tell her about shooting Tony San Martano, or to explain why he was investigating her family in the first place. His attitude reminded her less of a hostile witness and more of, yes, one of the guys who'd sat in the back of the class in high school, answering only when called on, not much interested in the accuracy of his answers. He was answering because he didn't want to offend her. It was all mildly unpleasant, but maybe once it was over and Tracy had her answers, they could have a friendly relationship. 

_"Anyway, your father looked dead to me, but I don't guess I'm the best one to ask about who's dead and who's not. But he'd been shot in the head. You knew that, right?"_

_This was harder than Tracy had expected. She nodded._

_"I got no idea what you're supposed to do for a guy with a bullet in his head, so even if he hadn't been dead—which he was, I asked later, I asked Frank—I wouldn't've known what to do. Sonny'd been shot in the chest, I knew what to do about that, so I . . . ." he trailed off. "I couldn't have saved him," Vinnie said. "I'm sorry, but I couldn't."_

If he had been trying to make her feel bad, he’d done a great job. Tracy wanted to ask him something pertinent—she had a whole list of questions that really mattered—but instead she’d asked him why he’d kissed her, which wasn't important at all, except that she wanted to know, she really wanted to know. 

Tracy went back to the kitchen. She wasn't hungry, she was bored, and so what? She was an adult, she was having a bad, bad day, if she wanted to drown her sorrows in too much food, that was her business. But there was nothing to drown her sorrows in. She'd eaten the sherbet, and the spaghetti. She still had chocolate syrup, but the milk had gone bad, and she wasn’t going to stoop to drinking chocolate syrup. She was down to three pieces of bread, one of them a heel. There was butter, and blackberry jelly, she could have a sandwich— 

Instead, she took the notebook and pen off the refrigerator and started a grocery list. Milk, she needed, and bread; carrots, and green peppers, she wanted to make soup that weekend. Was there chicken in the freezer? There was, and a couple of bags of mixed vegetables, and a roast. So, chicken didn't need to go on the list, but for some reason Tracy had written it anyway; she scratched it out. Coffee, cereal, orange juice, she'd finished the last of the orange juice that morning. It seemed ages ago, lifetimes. Frozen waffles, raspberry sherbet, chocolate syrup, a Sara Lee cheesecake— 

Tracy's grocery list was turning into more of a wish-list of food she wanted right that very minute. And her handwriting looked funny, it wasn't familiar—no, it was familiar, it just didn't look like her writing, it looked like mother's, the same loopy tails on the g's and y's, the same sharp h's and f's standing up like little spears. When had she started writing like her mother? Tracy stuck the notebook back on the refrigerator by its little magnetic strip, the pen slid through the spiral ring. _I made Vinnie cry. Sonny was already mad at me—he sent Vinnie to talk to me! And now I've made Vinnie cry._

_Sonny was mad at me? So what? He's my uncle, he has no business treating me like some business associate who's late making a payment! If he wanted me talked to, he should have done it himself—in fact, even if he didn't want to, he should have done it, he should have talked to me when I was over the other night— Except this is Sonny you're talking about. What did you really expect him to say?_

__"You want to know why you're here right now? Because Sonny told me to have a talk to you about the other night."_ _

_Tracy gad just looked at him. She’d been sheltered from the business, but she knew what Sonny telling him to have a talk her meant._

__"Really?" she'd asked him coldlly._ _

__"Yeah, he told me to tell you you're crazy. In case you didn't know, that's Steelgrave for 'shut up, don't talk about it.' You should write **that** down, it's something you're going to need to know."_ _

_There were a lot of things she’d needed to know. She hadn't known, because nobody had told her, that Vinnie had been abducted, taken to El Salvador and tortured. Consequently, she handled asking him about it very badly, but she probably could have fixed it, could have ended the whole thing by apologizing for not understanding about that, but she never got that far. She only got as far as Tony deVoss._

_Tracy still didn't know who Tony deVoss was, except that Vinnie had been in prison with him, and that they'd once had a fight. And that when she mentioned his name, all the color drained out of Vinnie's face, and when Tracy stupidly, blindly, pressed him about deVoss, Vinnie flipped out and started yelling at her, knocking over his chair, ripping up her notebook, and throwing her out of the apartment. All of that was scary, disturbing, all of that had upset her, of course it had, why wouldn't it, to be practically dragged to the front door and pushed out of it, her briefcase tossed after her, of course that had frightened her, but it wasn't why Tracy couldn't seem to settle down, why she wanted so badly to talk to Sonny. It was what she heard when the door had been slammed behind her—and the bolt thrown, and the chain latched, as though Vinnie thought she might try to break back in? No, what was worst was what she heard before the music started blasting, and that was Vinnie crying._

_He wasn't crying as thought he was sad, or even angry. It was more like he was about to throw up, as though his body had been overcome by enormous, gasping sobs that were trying to tear him apart. Tracy only heard them for a minute, maybe two, then the music started, making the floor vibrate._

_Tracy had picked up her briefcase, taken the elevator down to the parking garage, and after sitting for a few minutes to compose herself, had driven home._

_She still didn't know who Tony deVoss was to Vinnie, and now she had no idea why Vinnie was so upset about him, either._

_The line was still busy. Sonny was home by now, and Tracy had no idea what he was thinking. But then, when had she ever known that? She dialed again, then slammed down the receiver and put the phone on the coffee table next to her empty spaghetti plate. Then she picked up the TV remote, turned on the TV, pulled the afghan off the back of the sofa and wrapped it around herself as tight as she could. She wasn't cold, and it wasn't warmth she was looking for, but comfort._

_Tracy watched TV the rest of the evening, bits and pieces of shows that she couldn't really follow, changing stations every time a commercial came on, or something ended, or she got bored. The late news got passed by every time she came to it, though she usually watched it. Tonight, she was looking for diversion, but she wasn't really finding it. Every so often she'd mute the sound and dial Sonny's number, but the line was always busy. Had someone taken the phone off the hook? That had to be it—didn't it? Neither Sonny nor Vinnie had anybody they'd talk to on the phone for hours on end—did they?_

_If she'd had to bet one way or the other, Tracy would have bet the answer to that was no, but did she know for sure? Did she know anything for sure, about either one of them? Did she even know what she didn't know, and what she did, and how could she find out?_

_The answer to that one was, she couldn't. She was stuck with what they gave her._

_Near midnight Tracy went back to the kitchen and started throwing things out of the freezer until she found another pint of raspberry sherbet. She took it with her to the sofa, then went back to the kitchen, ate as much of the sherbet as she needed to make room in the container, and smothered what was left in chocolate syrup. Whenever she'd made this concoction at home, her father had sent her out of the room to eat it. In his eyes it was right there on par with Irish spaghetti, though it didn't offend his sense of heritage._

_You made Vinnie cry, she told herself. Uncle Sonny is going to be so mad at you. You made Vinnie **cry** — _

_And besides what Sonny thought, Tracy felt bad about it all on her own. _Who was Tony deVoss, and why should Vinnie cry about a guy he beat up in prison?_ It didn't make any sense to Tracy, and she was pretty sure she was never going to have a chance to find out, not that it mattered, only what had she done? _

__Abducted and taken to El Salvador and tortured, hallucinating—Aiuppo told me about the hallucinating, but he said Vinnie had been sick! Uncle Sonny never told me about any of it._ Tracy couldn't imagine what that would be like, what it would do to a person, what it had done to Vinnie. It explained his inertia, and why Aiuppo had been so worried about him. It didn't explain Sonny wanting to disappear with him at the cost of the lifestyle he was enjoying and at the risk of his actual life. Tracy loved her uncle very much, but she would never have mistaken him for anybody's caretaker. _

__Maybe it's just this simple: Vinnie makes him stupid because love makes a person stupid._ That made more sense than any other explanation she had. _

_Finally when she dialed the phone rang once, then it stopped ringing, but no one said anything. "Uncle Sonny?" Tracy asked carefully._

_"Yeah," he said, and he sounded tired. "What?" It was barely a question._

_For a second Tracy couldn't think what to say. "Is everything OK?"_

_"Everything's fine," Sonny said. Neither of them said anything about Vinnie._

_Tracy wanted to ask, but if something was wrong it was probably her fault and should she ask, or— "Is Vinnie OK?" She asked mostly because she couldn’t think of anything else to say._

_"Vinnie's **fine,** " Sonny said, and his tone told her to change the damned subject. _

_So Tracy said the only other thing she could think of. "I'm sorry."_

_"Is that why you called?"_

_She had the feeling there was no right answer to that question. "Yes, partly."_

_"What else?"_

_When you were drowning, did it really matter how deep the water was? A foot too deep, a yard, a mile—what difference did it make? "Did my father kill somebody name Stan Dermott?" Tracy couldn't have explained why she asked this._

_"Who?"_

_"Vinnie said—_

_Sonny sighed. "Oh, him. Yeah. I told him not to, but he wanted to do it himself."_

_"You mean—" Sonny did not mean he hadn't wanted Stan Dermott dead, that he hadn't wanted him killed. He meant only that he wanted somebody not his brother to pull the trigger. Tracy didn't need that explained to her. "Never mind. Uncle Sonny, somebody had to ask him questions. Somebody **had to,** and you just—you don't think clearly about him. So that left me—" _

_"This isn't any of your business," Sonny said, but there was no heat behind the words, and that was upsetting. He wasn't angry, and that just left indifference._

_"I'm right about this," Tracy went on as though he hadn't said anything._

_"It doesn't matter!" This time there was a lot of heat in the words. "What do you think you're gonna find out that could possibly be worse than what I already know, huh? And he's here, isn't he? So what's the point?"_

_That was not what Tracy had expected. Sonny was a lot of things, but self-aware had never seemed to be one of them. "I just wanted to protect you," she said, futility turning the words a dull gray._

_"You can't," Sonny said, and the words closed a door and locked it. "Tracy." He seemed about to say something, then said something else instead. "You got a piece of paper?"_

_"What?" Tracy asked, confused by the subject change._

_"Paper, you got a piece?"_

_"Sure, yeah," Tracy said, getting up to get a notebook from her desk._

_"Pen?"_

_"Yes," she said, trying to keep the asperity from her voice._

_"Great. Write this down."_

_For a moment she thought he was going to have her write _I will not interfere in my uncle's life_ a hundred times, simply because she couldn't think what else he could want her to write. Instead he started reading her names, addresses, telephone numbers, spelling them slowly and distinctly. At first Tracy was confused again, but after the first two—both with addresses in the Bronx—she knew what he was doing. He was giving her back to her mother's family, he was— _

_That was crazy, but that was what it felt like. Her uncle was telling her he wasn't hers to worry about any more, that if she wanted family, well, there was a whole bunch she wasn’t using._

_Sonny told her about her aunts and cousins; he told her stories she'd never heard before, about her mother's family. Her aunts Doreen and Katie had come to her parents' wedding, and things had only gotten truly bad later, when her mother's father issued an ultimatum that no one was to talk to Rita._

_"Your mother didn't take that well," Sonny said dryly. "She had a helluva temper on her, your mother. If they weren't going to talk to her, well, she wasn't going talk to them. And that's how things stayed. But none of it's got anything to do with you. You weren't even born when it all started."_

_Tracy wanted to interrupt him, she didn't want to hear this, but she couldn't think what to say. She wanted to cry, but she wasn't going to let herself; it wouldn't help anyway._

_"Call them up, introduce yourself, go see them. You gotta move on with your life," Sonny said. "You gotta quit saying I'm the only family you got."_

_"You're disowning me?" Tracy asked. She hadn't meant to say it, and she regretted it the minute the words were out._

_She expected him to laugh at her, to accuse her of being melodramatic, but Sonny didn't say anything, and he didn't laugh. And he didn't deny it. "You're smart. You'll be fine."_

_"This is because of what happened today—"_

_"It's not about today," Sonny interrupted her. "It's just something you gotta do. I'm not disowning you. I'm pushing you out of the nest is all."_

_"I don't want—I don't want to do this," Tracy said._

_"Lotta things we do that we don't want to, Princess," Sonny said, but not unkindly. "That's how life goes. You need a life of your own."_

_Tracy wasn't crying, and she wasn't going to cry, not until she hung up the phone. "What about the money I'm holding for you?" She kept her voice businesslike._

_"Keep it," Sonny said. "Don't worry about it."_

_"Keep it? Uncle Sonny, there's over seventeen thousand dollars—"_

_"I know how much there is. There's plenty more where that came from. You're smart, you can figure out a way to use it without the IRS catching on."_

__I don't think I can do this._ Tracy kept quiet. It was the only way she could think of to keep from crying. _

_Sonny was telling her about a cousin of hers, Chloe, who was in law school, and that Tracy should call her. He told her this the same way her parents would tell her she was the same age as the child of some friend of theirs, as though being twelve was a remarkable thing to have in common, and sure to make you instant best friends._

_Tracy heard the snick and sizzle of a cigarette lighter. _Uncle Sonny doesn't smoke—_ But Vinnie did, he used a fake cigarette lighter, a prop he'd devised—only he didn't use it anymore. Now he used a gold lighter that probably cost a thousand dollars. No engraving on it, but there was no doubt it was a present from her uncle—who was now smoking, too. _

_Somehow, this last piece of information was the one Tracy's mind needed to understand the hopelessness of her small crusade. She was tired. The tears weren't struggling against the back of her eyes anymore, and she didn't feel like yelling, or throwing things. She just wanted to curl up on her sofa under her afghan and close her eyes and go to sleep._

_But first she had a telephone conversation to finish. He'd said something about them leaving, moving, going someplace else. "Where are you going to go?" It was hard to think of the words to say._

_She could practically hear Sonny's shrug. "Don't know yet. It doesn't really matter."_

_And Tracy knew what he meant was, _It doesn't really matter **to you.**_ _

_"You've been to my funeral once, Princess. You don't need to go again."_

_She wouldn't even know when he died, or how. The next time, there'd be no one to contact her, unless it was Vinnie again, and Vinnie— Would Vinnie? Probably. And if he didn't—well, it wouldn't really matter, would it? Her uncle had died a long time ago._

_"Please tell Vinnie I'm sorry," Tracy said. "I didn't mean to upset him."_

_"Yeah," Sonny agreed, "I'll tell him." Then he said goodnight._

_And so did she, and Tracy hung up the phone._


End file.
